This is the fourth in a series of articles exploring landfills, food waste and methane emissions in Prince George’s County and neighboring jurisdictions. The series is partly supported by an Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
On July 1, the city of Laurel entered what can be called the third phase of food recycling, with an ecological policy too bold for many other jurisdictions to consider. In 2023, then-Mayor Craig Moe and the city council decided to fight climate change — and save taxpayers about $60 a ton in tipping fees — by becoming the first jurisdiction in Maryland to require residents to separate food waste from their trash so it could be recycled. Some organizations, like grocery stores and colleges, have been required to do this since 2023, as well.
“We have had a voluntary organics recycling program since 2019,” Michele Blair, Laurel’s sustainability manager, said. “Now we’re going to start enforcing it.”
How far is Laurel ahead of the curve? Let’s examine some recent experiences in Montgomery County, which is still in what could be considered the first phase of food recycling (i.e., where some individuals voluntarily participate in pilot programs), and the unincorporated areas of Prince George’s County, which are in a second phase that is countywide but voluntary.
Cecilie Counts is a vegetarian who lives in an unincorporated area of Silver Spring. Unincorporated parts of Montgomery County use dual-stream recycling, so Counts dutifully places her bottles, cans and plastic containers in a separate bin from paper and cardboard. She also bought a rolling cart for garbage and puts her yard trim in plastic trash cans. In mid-May, she happened upon a pilot program at a farmers market and received a countertop container and one green compostable bag.
“I didn’t know if I was supposed to put the container out with the other recycling,” Counts said. “However, when they told me, ‘Bring your food scraps back here for composting,’ I thought, ‘Forget it. I already put my coffee grounds on my plants, but I am not driving any dead food all the way back here.’ If my trash contained rotting meat, that would be even more disgusting.”
Counts is not alone. There are several reasons why many people who conscientiously sort and recycle everything else are hesitant to sort their food waste from their trash. First, there’s the environmental question. A big advantage of commercial composting over backyard options is that commercial processing safely incorporates meat and bones, which in a backyard composter can attract rats and other critters. But should a vegetarian drive a 3,500-pound car 10 miles to keep a few pounds of banana and potato peels from making methane in a landfill?
Second, Counts didn’t have the proper equipment or information to efficiently or effectively participate in sorting food for composting. In selected parts of Silver Spring, Bethesda and Potomac, she could have volunteered for a pilot program that would have provided a countertop container, dozens of compostable bags and a 35-gallon rolling cart for food scraps from the countertop container. This pilot does weekly curbside pickups. She would have also been able to include paper products with food debris on them, like pizza boxes, napkins and compostable plates — all items that can contaminate traditional recyclables like cardboard, bottles and cans. Composting keeps these paper products out of landfills and incinerators.
Finally, even though Montgomery County composts leaves, grass and garden clippings, it lacks the infrastructure to process food waste, which it sends to the Prince George’s County Organics Processing Facility. This is probably one reason why Montgomery County hasn’t scaled up its household food recycling beyond pilot programs. In Prince George’s County, on the other hand, all 180,000 households served by county trash pickup in unincorporated county areas, like Chillum and Adelphi, had been given a free kitchen caddy and a 32-gallon wheeled organics cart by January 2024. Residents in these areas have the added advantage of being able to add yard trimmings to the carts, rather than place the debris in paper bags.
Nevertheless, some residents in Prince George’s County resisted and asked for the carts to be removed. In December 2024, Marilyn Naumann, associate director of the Prince George’s County Department of the Environment’s Recovery Resource Division, told the BioCycle newsletter that when the county offered curbside recycling of bottles, cans and mixed paper years ago, “We used a similar outreach and education approach and got very high participation almost immediately. Few requests were made to pick up the recycling cart. That’s a stark difference from our organics collection program.” Regardless, Naumann expected participation in the food-scraps recycling program to rise by 40% over the next two to four years, with a long-term goal of 85% participation. At that level, “diverting food scraps is just as normal as recycling,” she said.
The same “ick factor” that bothered Counts has stymied third-phase — meaning mandatory — food-scrap recycling programs across the nation. On April 1, New York City made food-scrap recycling mandatory; homeowners that failed to do this faced a $25 fine for their first violation. By mid-April, the city had issued more than 3,600 citations, though the backlash was so strong that officials now ticket only the most serious repeat offenders.
How does Laurel plan to make mandatory food separation succeed? Blair said that the city has tried to build community support by providing residents with ample information about the advantages of food separation: decreased methane emissions, financial savings from smaller and more fuel-efficient collection trucks, and fewer unwanted critters attracted by trash overflow. She said that the city has provided all the kitchen caddies, containers, carts and compostable bags citizens need to make the process as convenient as possible.
Laurel also plans to employ technology — including digital cart tagging, photography and near-field readers — to monitor which carts have been emptied by the city’s crews, which have been missed and which have never been used at all. Blair’s department will use data from the field to identify issues and provide residents with assistance as needed — or issue warnings.
“Nobody wants to give and enforce citations,” Blair said. “Our message is that this is serious, this is important, and if you keep refusing to cooperate, you will get a fine. People are already putting their trash into containers; all we want you to do is put your food waste into a different container.” The statute calls for a $50 fine on the first offense, and up to $150 for each additional violation.
In nearby Hyattsville, City Councilmember Danny Schaible (Ward 2) would like his city to make food composting mandatory. “Money is a really good incentive to change behavior, but I think there are better solutions than fines,” Schaible said. “In many communities, people pay for trash pickup and are charged higher rates for garbage than recyclables or compostables. It’s called ‘pay as you throw,’ but I’d rather call it ‘save as you sort.’ The more food you recycle, the more you save.” Montgomery County is evaluating a “save as you throw” pilot program.
Motivating people to sort food waste is challenging. In November 2024, the journal Nature published a study of five states with laws calling for mandatory food recycling. It concluded that Massachusetts, which was diverting 13% of food waste at the time of the study, was the only state that achieved a statistically significant result of keeping more than 3% out of landfills.
Neil Seldman, a cofounder of the advocacy organization Zero Waste USA, believes that policies like “pay as you throw” can help individual communities do five to six times better than those statewide results. “San Francisco claims an 85% food diversion rate,” he said. “I suspect they’re fudging the numbers a little, but it suggests that with the right incentives, Laurel might certainly achieve that in a few years.”
Paul Ruffins is a citizen scientist and a professor of curiosity.